Alternatives to Spacemacs
A community-driven Emacs configuration that combines Emacs with Vim-style editing and mnemonic key bindings. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
Spacemacs
A community-driven Emacs configuration that combines Emacs with Vim-style editing and mnemonic key bindings.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as Spacemacs.
Doom Emacs
An opinionated configuration framework that turns GNU Emacs into a fast, modular editing environment.
Doom Emacs is another ready-made Emacs configuration with a modular setup and command-line package tooling, officially listed for macOS and Linux rather than Windows.
GNU Emacs
An editor that is really a Lisp environment, extensible to the point where people run their email, calendar and shell inside it.
GNU Emacs on its own means building your own configuration in Emacs Lisp, without the Vim bindings and curated layers Spacemacs provides.
LazyVim
A Neovim setup built on lazy.nvim that turns Neovim into a preconfigured IDE.
LazyVim moves you to a preconfigured Neovim IDE setup built on lazy.nvim, trading the Emacs package ecosystem for Neovim plugins and a terminal-first editor.
AstroNvim
A ready-made Neovim configuration with preset plugins, language tooling and a modular structure.
AstroNvim is a ready-made Neovim configuration with Mason-installed language tooling, replacing Emacs Lisp with Neovim's Lua configuration.
NvChad
A Neovim configuration base with fast startup, built-in UI plugins and dozens of themes.
NvChad is a small Neovim base configuration with fast startup and dozens of themes, meaning native Vim editing instead of Vim bindings on Emacs.
Lem
A general-purpose editor and IDE written in and extensible with Common Lisp, with Emacs and Vim keybindings.
Lem offers Emacs-like and Vim-like modes in an editor extensible with Common Lisp rather than Emacs Lisp, with built-in LSP support.
Aquamacs
An editor based on GNU Emacs and adapted to feel at home on macOS.
Aquamacs is a Mac-only Emacs adapted to macOS conventions, without Spacemacs's Vim-style bindings and based on an older Emacs in its stable release.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
Magit
A complete text-based Git interface that runs inside GNU Emacs.
Denote
An Emacs note-taking package that organises plain-text notes through a predictable, descriptive file naming scheme.
Ement.el
A Matrix chat client that runs inside GNU Emacs.
PDF Tools
Emacs package for viewing, searching and annotating PDF files inside the editor.
Neovim
A modern rewrite of Vim with a built-in language server client, Lua configuration and an embeddable API.
Vim
The editor that is already on every server, with a graphical build for Windows and a licence that asks you to donate to Ugandan children.
